Neylan’s mother, whom she refers to in this article, is Ariel Bybee, noted mezzo-soprano who has sung in over 450 performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

As a child, I accompanied my mother to work far more often than I accompanied my father. Mom’s work was way more fun than my dad’s legal practice: She was an opera singer, the embodiment of a glamorous and glorious diva. In the bowels of the Metropolitan Opera House, the make-up artist would dash a bit of blush on my cheeks, the dressers would knit outfits for my Cabbage Patch Dolls while the singers were on stage. I learned early on to stand motionless behind the stage manager’s desk while my mother took a calming breath before elegantly bearing an unfailingly elaborate costume into the magical world of the proscenium.

The fact that my mother worked while I was a child remains a defining element of my upbringing. I was so proud of her. I recognized early on the physical power required to sing unamplified to an auditorium of four thousand people and be heard perfectly over an orchestra. I loved the stories she acted in, the fairy tale doll coming to life in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman and the life and death passion of Bizet’s Carmen.

But another element of my upbringing balanced out the egocentric grandeur of the stage. My mother was a devoted member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving as Primary President and Relief Society president in our Manhattan ward while portraying freewheeling Jenny in Mahagonny or the young boy Sesto in La Clemenza di Tito across the street from our chapel. Throughout my childhood, my mother successfully straddled both sides of Lincoln Center: on one side, she excelled on the Met stage, while on the other side, she faithfully attended and served in the Manhattan chapel.

The balance demonstrated so exceptionally by my mother allowed me to see that, despite the one-size-fits-all expectations that we sometimes embrace for women, there are many ways for a Mormon woman to choose the right. Constructing a life of faith and service was, for my mother, a grueling lifelong pursuit requiring an intense personal relationship with the Lord and an iron sense of self-worth. She appeared externally to have little in her life that mirrored the “ideal” Mormon woman template often preached from the pulpit: She did not have a Priesthood-bearing husband, she did not have a lovely suburban home, she did not have an abundance of children. She often felt judged for these perceived failures, but in her heart she understood the Lord’s purpose for her.

“[Mormon] culture is unused to sustaining two identities in any one woman,” wisely observes poet Emma Lou Thayne in the recently published book Mormon Women: Portraits and Conversations (Handcart Books, 2009). The co-existence of faith alongside a life in the world is the theme so movingly explored in the fourteen profiles of this book. Author James N. Kimball and photographer Kent Miles spent years traveling to Scotland, Japan, France, Brazil and throughout the United States interviewing and photographing Mormon women who are unlikely to fit the standard mold, but who live their religions with exceptional grace.

My mother’s own dual identity as a singer and a Mormon woman finds companionship in the lives of these remarkable women. Consistently, these women successfully balance their faith with involvement in professional, civic, or service pursuits in a way that makes meaningful and lasting changes not only in their families but in the world around them.

“My culture idolizes the simplified woman, ardent and singular, bent to the collective and determined to serve it,” Thayne continues in her profile. “The idea of the radiant mother, which I have been a part of for nearly forty years, is not something I would abandon. But a concomitant life beckoned, the life of those poets. It’s one of the great human dilemmas: How could I live both lives and be fulfilled without sometimes neglecting one or the other? Mostly by being tired in the morning.”

What mother hasn’t felt that pull at the end of the day when the little ones are tucked in bed to invest in something that confirms her own intelligence, her own spiritual longings, her own creative goals? And what mother hasn’t woken up the next morning, on far too little sleep, bemoaning but never regretting that sacred second life? The passions and skills of Mormon women vary in the time invested and the recognition received, but the constant back-and-forth tug between ourselves and those we serve is common to us all.

For my mother, this balance was defined in part by the fact that she had only one child. While she mostly gave up international performance to be home with me, she might have had to sacrifice more of her career -- or the whole thing -- if she had had more children. Similarly, many women profiled in Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations have never married or have small nuclear families, giving them the time and impetus to invest in lives outside the traditional Mormon family structure. Cecile Pelous, a fashion designer from Paris, was not able to have children of her own, giving her the time and means to start an orphanage in Nepal. She is now the official, adoptive mother of seventy-nine Nepalese children. “They are now in my genealogy,” she explains in her profile. “I have learned that I am not important, but I am sure that the time and effort I have given has changed the lives of so many children. For me, it isn’t necessary that I personally give life to a baby. I am mother to a hundred and thirty-eight [the number served in her orphanage].”

Catherine M. Stokes, a public health administrator profiled in the book, identifies the inverse relationship between time required by a family and the time required to pursue an outside interest: “All women are single at some point in their lives. You’re single before you marry, and most women outlive their husbands, and they’re single again. You can have a wonderful life being single. You can serve. As a matter of fact, you may be in a situation of being freer to serve because you don’t have immediate responsibilities for someone else.”

It’s not surprising then that almost half of the women profiled were not married long-term or have only one child. So is the lesson of the book that we must give up abundant, life-long familial relationships in order to make a public impact on the world around us?

Absolutely not. While women with smaller families may have more time and energy to invest outside of their homes, the book also highlights women who fit the Mormon prototype: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Emma Lou Thayne, Christine Durham, Victoria Fong Kesler and Carol Gray all have followed the model that eluded my own mother. All around retirement age, each has been married to the same man and has born an abundance of children. The life model celebrated by these women is that of “times and seasons.” Each spent years in the trenches of motherhood, fulfilling years of traditional service at home and at Church. But life is long, and these women found an evening here and a morning there to piece together advance degrees, publications, teaching jobs or small business ideas. Englishwoman Carol Gray enlisted her grown daughter to help her deliver 27 convoys of aid supplies to the Balkan War zone. Kiyo Tanaka serves as a news anchor for the deaf, using everyday the gift of sign language given to her by her deaf parents to serve the community around her. Each woman’s life remains entwined with Church and family, but the long reaches of time, age and experience have allowed her to extend her skills beyond her home.

While my mother pursued music professionally, I dedicated thousands of hours in my youth to studying solo piano. Aside from the hours spent at school, nothing else in my life required so much time and commitment as my piano studies. Once, as a teenager, I had the opportunity to visit with a revered older woman who had held positions of Church-wide leadership and who seemed to me to embody supreme womanly spiritual grandeur. She too had spent thousands of hours as a youth committed to piano studies, and had been accepted to The Juilliard School for college where I was currently attending a high-school program. A woman even attending college in her era was a major accomplishment, and to be accepted to the world’s greatest conservatory an even greater honor. She pulled me close as she continued her own story: “Neylan, I never went,” she told me as my mouth dropped in bewilderment. “I loved the piano too much. I felt that if I gave my all to the piano, as Juilliard would require, I wouldn’t have enough room in my life to love the Savior.”

My older friend’s story left me confused and somewhat discouraged. As a Mormon woman myself with a thousand joys and curiosities in my life, did I have enough time, enough emotional and physical energy, to serve the Lord sufficiently?

Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations offers a hallowed relief to those women like me who have lived with a question mark over their multihued lives. Yes! if affirms. You may be tired in the morning, but over the course of a life, faith and family can walk hand in hand with a life of worldly work. The women’s stories are a spectacular and long-overdue testament to our historically underestimated capacity.

The aftertaste of that initial affirmation is, however, slightly bitter. Upon reflection, the stories might seem in fact too spectacular. While thrilled that our culture is represented in the broader world by such richly woven lives, I also found myself feeling a little overwhelmed by the greatness of it all. What does this greatness mean for me? Am I still justified in pursuing my “concomitant life,” as Emma Lou Thayne describes her non-motherly pursuits, even if I never win a Pulitzer Prize (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich), become governor of my province (Lea Rosser) or survive a Stalinist gulag in Siberia (Tsobinar Tadevosyan)?